I know this might not be a popular question on other forums like reddit, but It will help me with some clarity.
I have a wife and 2 kids, and will be moving from my 3rd world country to Switzerland.
My wife will initially not work as she will help manage the children until we find schools and maybe later on if she can find a job she will start working. One kid is 3 years old and the other is 6 years old .
Where we currently live now we can live a average middle class life, and I can make good contributions to my pension fund, save for kids education etc
We have not gone into great detail on the offer yet, it has mainly been telephonic conversations, but I donât want them to lowball me because Iâm foreign if that makes sense.
I have about 19 years experience in my field, and currently work for their local distributor and i feel i have made a positive impact to their operations in my home country (that is why they want to move me to HO)
Will it be out of line to direct some of these questions to the employer without sounding rude or demanding?
If this is a duplicate post I apologize - but i donât see recent posts about this.
Discuss salary upfront with the hiring manager. Otherwise, why move to Switzerland? You already have a nice life back home. The move will be create many challenges in your family life, so better to be compensated for all the extra work.
If the hiring is put down by the salary discussion, wellâŠthereâs no reason to take the âopportunityâ seriously, because itâs not an opportunity.
You can legitimately ask HR for the salary band of that particular role and also what industry benchmarking figures they use. Iâve done that before and its been forthcoming.
Before I joined Roche back in 2008 the recruiter stated that they pay at, or slightly below market rates, but it was because they are an employer of choice and invest significantly in your development. From speaking with friends at Novartis I could see that this was indeed the case.
Now companies are sometimes transparent and provide some kind of banding information with salary reviews.
I asked for salary band of the department I was joining and my position within that band.
But for your job interview, Iâd ask for this information, but do your own homework first.
Itâs also a legitimate strategy to take a âlowerâ offer to get your foot in the door and then jump once you are more established in Switzerland.
I moved here without much of a salary increase from the UK, but after 3 years, changed jobs and got a 30% increase. Getting a job in CH when you already have one here and a permit is much easier than getting the first job from overseas.
In 25 years I never got a raise within a job. Only when I moved up the totem pole did my salary improve. Including once where I had to argue that they pay me, at least, the minimum of my new band. HR didnât want to because it was too much of an increase!
This is true, even when I got promoted to Director with much more responsibility, my salary stayed the same. HRâs argument was that the role now came with a company car, which was nice but not something everyone would/could take up. One colleague didnât have a drivers license so he was offered a GA (and taxed on it as a benefit).
There is a big difference between living as a native or an immigrant. For instance education is basically free even college in the local schools, but if you want to go private then that is a different matter⊠if you want to buy favourite foods from home rather than local foods that will cost more⊠likewise if you eat out etc. like expats rather than locals that will cost more and so on.
For a Swiss family of four 10K a month would be fine (I know many that live on a lot less), but immigrants on here seem to need a lot more.
And yet a s load comes here beyond ecstatic for 80k, which puts us here as some expensive unnecessary liability, so pointing out the lower bound just in case for delusional people that start sentences âwe italy have 1500, will be happy if i get somewhere 2000â epic facepalm
That surprises me, I had pay raises regularly (not only the Teuerungsausgleich - cost-of-living adjustment but proper raises) and all my life I never had to ask for it either.
As to the car, yes one boss kept mentioning (still giving me raises) that the car was a portion of wages. So when I was on garden leave for three months at the end of the contract, I told him Iâll keep the car for that time.
And I did. He couldnât argue it.
I disagree. I buy a lot of food from âforeign food storesâ and Iâm always stunned how much cheaper it is.
Eating out youâre right though, Indian, Chinese, Asian in general has always been crazy expensive eating out (I mean crazier than eating Swiss food out, LOL). They claim itâs because the communities = demand here is smaller than for example Germany. Germany afaIk doesnât have 25% international population, does it??
Initial discussions was around the 100k mark annually plus car. Which I feel might be a little low.
It is a sales role that will require international travel.
I might have started this thread prematurely but I guess the excitement and nerves got the better of me. Anyone that knows what is currently happening in South Africa will understand our excitement to possibly offer our children an better future.
My intention is not to come and be a freeloader on the swiss government, but to be a contributing member in society.
Once all details have and concerns have been shared with me and vice versa, I will resurrect this thread for opinions.
The discussions are still in its early phases, but the better In understand what âlifeâ will cost, the better my footing will be during negotiating.
If you have 19 years of experience and the job requires international travel, I would think that 100k is on the very low end. Do you get additional benefits for sales/boni etc?
This is only in German but maybe you can translate the key questions with deepl:
